The present invention relates generally to the field of cellular telephones and more specifically to a dual camera lens smart phone with a U-shaped lens cover.
Cellular telephones have become an omnipresent device in society today. Manufacturers have added so many additional features to cellular telephones that it is easy to forget they also make telephone calls. Cellular telephones that double as an Internet browser, an MP3 player, a camera or a camcorder have recently acquired the name smart-phones. These smart-phones have benefited from continued miniature-rization of integrated circuits. Camera phones can now take high-resolution pictures and even act as movie cameras because of the increased density available in memory chips. In order to take a high-resolution picture, the camera phones must include a delicate, high quality lens. Just as the lens on an expensive film camera needs a lens cap to protect the lens, so too should a high quality lens on a camera phone have a lens cover to provide protection.
The image quality of a digital camera depends on the number of pixels available in the solid-state image sensing device in the camera, such as a Charge Coupled Device (CCD). The solid-state image sensing device found in a traditional digital camera is a VGA-class device, which provides approximately 330 K pixels. The image quality of VGA cameras are low when compared to the image quality of conventional film cameras. However, VGA camera are more than sufficient for use as a “user facing” camera. Such digital camera are often found on the tops of display screens of laptop computers and on the monitors of desktop computers. Cameras that face the user allow the user to transmit their image to others, during a texting “chat” session or during a voice and video tele-conference, for example.
Traditional digital cameras and camera phones have one “On” button that the user must locate and press before they can use any feature on the device. What is needed in the field is a camera phone that allows the user to take a picture, or video, simply by opening the lens cover.